Man of the Hour: Night Of Love. Diana Palmer

and his hand made her shiver with its tender tracing. “I parked the car in your own driveway after we’d had dinner. I touched you, just like this, while we talked. You were more impulsive then, much less inhibited. Do you remember what you did, Meg?”

      She was finding it difficult to talk and breathe at the same time. “I was very…young,” she said, defending herself.

      “You were hungry.” His lips parted and brushed her mouth open, softly nibbling at it until he heard the sound she made deep in her throat. “You unbuttoned my shirt and slid your hand inside it, right down to my waist.”

      She shivered, remembering what that had triggered. His mouth had hit hers like a tidal wave, with a groan that echoed in the silence of the car. He’d lifted her, turned her, and his hand had gone down inside the low bodice of her black dress to cup her naked breast. She’d come to her senses all too soon, fighting the intimacy. He’d stopped at once, and he’d smiled down at her as she lay panting in his arms, on fire with the first total desire she’d ever felt in her life. He’d known. Then, and now…

      “You were so innocent,” he said quietly, remembering. “You had no idea why I reacted so violently to such a little caress. It was like the first time I let you feel me against you when I was fully aroused. You were shocked and frightened.”

      “My parents never told me anything, and my girlfriends were just as stupid as I was, they made sure of it,” she said hesitantly. “All the reading in the world doesn’t prepare you for what happens, for what you feel when a man touches you intimately.”

      His hand smoothed over the shoulder of her black dress, back to the zipper. Slowly, gently, he eased it down, controlling her panicked movement with careless ease.

      “It’s been four years and you want it,” he said. “You want me.”

      She couldn’t believe that she was allowing him to do this! She felt like a zombie as he eased the fabric below the soft, lacy cup of her strapless bra and looked at her. His big, lean hand, darkly tanned, stroked her collarbone and down, smoothing over the swell of her breasts while he looked at her in the semidarkness.

      His mouth touched her forehead. His breath was a little unsteady. So was hers.

      “Let me unhook it, Meg. I want you in my mouth.”

      This had always been his sharpest weapon, this way of talking to her that made her body burn with dark, wicked desires. Her forehead rested against his chin while his fingers quickly disposed of three small hooks. She felt the cool air on her body even as he moved her back and looked down, his posture suddenly stiff and poised, controlled.

      “My God.” It was reverent, the way he spoke, the way he looked at her. His hands contracted on her shoulders as if he were afraid that she might vanish.

      “I let you look at me…that last night,” she whispered unsteadily. “And you went to her!”

      “No. No,” he whispered, bending his head. “No, Meg!”

      His mouth fastened on her taut nipple and he groaned as he lifted her, turned her, suckling her in a silence that blazed with tension and promise.

      Her fingers gripped his thick hair and held on while his mouth gave her the most intense pleasure she’d ever known. He’d tried to kiss her this way that long-ago night and she’d fought him. It had been too much for her already overloaded senses and, coupled with his raging arousal and the sudden determination of his weight on her body, she’d panicked. But she was older now, with four years of abstinence to heighten her need, strip her nerves raw. She was starved for him.

      His mouth fed on her while his fingers traced around the firm softness he was enjoying. She felt his tongue, his teeth, the slow suction that seemed to draw the heart right out of her body. She shuddered, helpless, anguished, as the ardent pressure of his mouth only made the hunger grow.

      He felt her tremble and slowly lifted his head.

      “Noo…!” She choked, clutching at him, trying to draw his mouth back to her body. “Steve…please…please!”

      He drew her face into his throat and held her, his arms punishing, his breath as ragged as her own.

      “Please!” she sobbed, clinging.

      “Here…!” He fought the buttons of his shirt open and dragged her inside it, pressing her close to him, so that her bare breasts were rubbing against the thick hair on his chest, teasing his tense muscles. “Meg,” he breathed tenderly. “Oh, Meg, Meg…!” His hands found their way around her, sweeping down her bare back in long, hungry caresses that made the intimacy even more dangerous, more threatening.

      Her mouth pressed soft kisses into his throat, his neck, his collarbone, and she felt the need like a knife.

      He turned her head and kissed her again, a long, slow, deep kiss that never seemed to end while around them the night darkened and the wind blew.

      Somewhere in the middle of it, she began to cry—great, broken sobs of guilt and grief and unappeased hunger. He held her, cradled her against him, his eyes as anguished as his unsatisfied body. But slowly, finally, the desire in both of them began to relax.

      “Don’t cry,” he whispered, kissing the tears from her eyes. “It was inevitable.”

      She turned her face so that he could kiss the other side of it, her eyes closed while she savored the rare, exquisite tenderness.

      When she felt his lips reluctantly draw away, she opened her eyes and looked into his. They were soft, just for her, just for the moment. Soft and hungry, and somehow violent.

      “You’re untouched,” he said huskily, his face setting into hard, familiar lines. “Even here.” His hand smoothed over her bare, swollen breast and as if the feel of it drove him mad, he bent his head and tenderly drew his lips over it, breathing in the scent of her body. “Totally, absolutely untouched.”

      “I…can’t feel like this with any other man,” she confessed, shaken to her soul by what they were sharing. “I can’t bear another man’s eyes to touch me, much less his hands.”

      His breath drew in raggedly. “Why in God’s name did you leave, damn you?”

      “I was afraid!”

      “Of this?” His mouth opened over her nipple and she cried out at the flash of pleasure it gave her to feel it so intimately.

      “I was a virgin,” she gasped.

      “You still are.” He drew her across him, one big hand gathering her hips blatantly into the hard thrust of his, holding her there while he searched her eyes. “And you’re still afraid,” he said finally, watching the shocked apprehension grow on her face. “Terrified of intimacy with me.”

      She swallowed, then swallowed again. Her eyes dropped to his bare chest. “Not…of that.”

      “Then what?”

      His body throbbed. She could feel the heat and power of it and she felt faint with the knowledge of how desperately he wanted her. “Steven, my sister died in childbirth.”

      “Yes, I know. Your father told me. It was such a private thing, I didn’t feel it was my place to ask questions. I just know she was twelve years older than you.”

      She looked up at him. “She was…like me,” she whispered slowly. “Thin and slender, not very big in the hips at all. They lived up north. It snowed six feet the winter she was ready to deliver and her husband couldn’t get her to a hospital in time. She died. So did the baby.” Meg hesitated, nibbling her lower lip. “Childbirth is difficult for the women in my family. My mother had to have a cesarean section when I was born. I was very sheltered and after my sister died, mother made it sound as if pregnancy would be a death sentence for me, too. She made me terrified of getting pregnant,” she added miserably, hiding her face from him.

      He eased his intimate hold on her, stunned. His hand guided her cheek to his broad, hair-roughened chest